Aggressive measures in COVID early years credited for saving thousands of lives

The Burnet Institute says Australia’s aggressive approach to suppressing COVID-19 in the first two years of the pandemic has been vindicated in saving thousands of lives, leading to a death rate 33 times lower than the United Kingdom and 46 times lower than the United States.

But Australia lost its relative global advantage during 2022 and 2023 when excess deaths reached 31,000, an 18-fold increase compared to the first two years – an outcome it attributes in part to the shift by governments to “living with COVID” without ongoing clear transmission-reduction strategies.

The Burnet Institute says a comparison of global death data highlights how well Australia performed in the first two years of the pandemic. Credit: Peter Rae

The analysis by the influential medical research institute – whose modelling and, at times controversial, advocacy for strong suppression measures informed policy decisions taken by Victoria, NSW and the Commonwealth during the pandemic – is contained in its submission to the federal government’s COVID-19 inquiry.

It divides Australia’s response into two phases: the initial pre-vaccine years of 2020 and 2021 before the Omicron variant, and the following two years, 2022 and 2023, post-vaccine and post-Omicron.

Burnet Institute’s head of public health, Professor Mark Stoove, said a comparative analysis of publicly available excess death data from 20 countries highlighted Australia’s success in avoiding tens of thousands of deaths during the first phase when it pursued harsh lockdowns, border closures and quarantine strategies.

“We’ve brought those comparisons to the fore to underscore the success from a health and COVID-prevention perspective of Australia’s response in the first phase,” Stoove said.

“We certainly do not minimise the impact that those lockdowns had on the economy, on businesses, on people’s mental health.

“But the flip side of that coin is that they were able to save tens of thousands of lives while the world was waiting for effective vaccines to emerge, and while Australia was waiting to procure sufficient vaccines for high coverage of the population.”

The submission states that Australia had an estimated 1744 excess deaths due to COVID-19 in 2020-21, which could have risen to between 57,552 and 80,224 deaths if it had experienced equivalent levels of excess deaths as the UK or US respectively in that period.

It also states that “the magnitude of the benefits of lives saved in the first two years have not been eroded in the later years”. While deaths increased as Australia opened up, it did not experience a vast number of “catch-up deaths” compared to countries where significant numbers of its vulnerable populations had already died in the initial phase.

“What we found is Australia sits around the middle of the pack [compared to other countries] in terms of excess deaths in 2022 and 2023. So it’s not like the countries that were most successful in controlling the virus in the first period then experienced adverse consequences down the track,” Stoove said.

Australia had a higher rate of excess deaths per person between January 2022 and July 2023 than Singapore, Canada, Israel and France but a lower rate than the UK, Germany, Finland and Japan. Australia’s rate was slightly above the US rate in this period.

The submission stated that during the second phase, there was a “lack of clear government response” to ongoing COVID challenges, which it attributed to political wariness of fatigued populations, and “widespread COVID-19 health promotion or related government communication did not occur”.

It further warns that “Australia does not yet have a clear strategic framework, targets, or public health program for managing COVID-19 into the future.”

Burnet’s research is also likely to be scrutinised in the inquiry, particularly its study claiming mask mandates turned around the pandemic during the height of Melbourne’s lockdowns, which was subsequently marked with a concerns notice by a scientific journal after a review identified multiple “weaknesses” in its findings. The institute has defended the study.

Burnet’s modelling on projected hospitalisations has also come under criticism. Its predicted peak of up to 4016 hospitalisations in NSW in September 2021 was not realised, with an actual peak of 1268 cases. Peak ICU demand came in at 242 cases rather than its projected 947.

Stoove said criticism of the modelling failed to account for the fact that, in response to the projections, governments made policy changes that changed the outcome.

“We were often accused of our models being wrong and, ultimately, they were wrong. But they were wrong because governments made decisions informed by the models that then changed the epidemic trajectory and therefore the impact on hospital numbers,” he said.

Liam Mannix’s Examine newsletter explains and analyses science with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Sign up to get it each week.